What if social media is actually creating a NEW pathology, instead of just contributing to anxiety and depression?
I wonder if perhaps the categorizations and therapeutic labels of the oughts are being pulled and stretched beyond their abilities (…certainly beyond their original intents). I wonder if we’re not seeing a new disorder. It seems to be comorbid with insecurity, high anxiety, histrionic tendencies, and possibly some diagnosable mental illnesses. It seems to be characterized by a lack of a real identity and instead a kind of decoherence, with frequent reliance on internet memes and archetypes:
1.) the DID sufferer (really just an insecure collection of play-acted semi-personalities, all manufactured);
2.) the transgender boy (really just an unhappy and awkward girl who has been mostly convinced through Tik Tok and her meagre friend group that her issues are sex and gender-based; she will walk some indeterminate distance down the road of ‘transition’ before she realizes that her problems always lay elsewhere and that this entire time she was adding chaos to her life, wasting money, and wasting TIME that could have been spent in the service of a healing journey);
3.) the oppression victim (who despite living in a wealthy strata of one of the wealthiest countries and enjoying a life almost completely free of violence or political/economic repression has based his identity largely around some trait (obesity, queerness [which now basically has no meaning whatsoever], ethnic distinction) for which he has collected a treasured little list of grievances which gives him some purpose and some relation to the world, even if it is mostly fictive…